Excellent question. It depends what you mean by tone. Certainly a thinner soundboard can give a more 'plunky' (strong attack, less sustain) sound than a thicker one (the extremes are banjo and grand piano) - but either can have good volume with appropriate stringing and technique. This is an over-generalisation, however, as a lot depends on the barring. For example a Smallman guitar has a very thin cedar top with a tight lattice of carbon/balsa barring underneath and has powerful attack and sustain. It also has a hefty internal frame to support high string tensions.
No straightforward answer, I suspect. Bill From: Herbert Ward <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, 18 September 2012, 3:46 Subject: [LUTE] Volume versus tone. In building a lute (and especially the sound board), is there a trade-off between tone and volume? Or does optimizing one automatically optimize the other? And similarly, is there a trade-off between tone and durability? In other words, can the builder achieve a better tone at the cost of a more fragile instrument? To get on or off this list see list information at [1]http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html -- References 1. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
